Anyone who knows me knows I’m not shy about talking about much of anything, especially sex. Although I’m happily married and in a monogamous relationship (in which I plan to stay for the rest of my days), I’ve been in relationships with both men and women and had my share of experiences during my 45 years. I’m an open-minded, sexual being.

In addition, I’ve worked for more than 22 years in family law. There’s not much of anything I haven’t heard when it comes to sex, and I’m rarely ever shocked. I’m the friend to whom you can talk about sexual positions, weird infections, unique fetishes and favorite toys. I have lots of great stories to tell (mostly about myself). I listen without judgment and can find the humor in pretty much anything.

So why, then, has it been so difficult for me to talk about sex as it relates to cancer? Read More →

After I fell in love my now husband, I started experiencing an uncomfortable feeling: a low-level feeling of dread that something bad was going to happen that would take him away from me. I’d never really felt anything like it before.

Actually, that’s not true. I had felt something like it before, but not for a very long time. Read More →

I recently learned that I have the BRCA-1 genetic mutation. I made the subsequent decision to have my healthy breasts removed in hopes of preventing me from getting breast cancer. It seems that I have an 87% chance of contracting this form of cancer in my lifetime. If that were to happen, it would mean a second “event” of the disease showing up in my body (the first being the widespread gynecologic cancer with which I was diagnosed December before last).

So I’ve had my port-o-cath for a little over a year now. It’s literally a part of me. This little medical devise was implanted under my skin last spring to enable my medical team to obtain easier access to my veins for purposes of administering chemotherapy. The catheter connects the port to a large vein in my neck. And under the skin, the port has a bubble through which drugs can be injected and blood samples can be drawn with less discomfort than repeated needle sticks. That’s the purpose of getting a port; and by and large, this was true in my case. The port saved me (and my poor infusion nurses) a lot of angst. But oh how I fought getting it. Read More →

I don’t know what it feels like to have a child and not have the dark cloud of cancer hanging over my head. I was diagnosed with Stage 3C widespread gynecologic cancer when my daughter was just five days old. So, despite my best efforts to live each day in the moment, there’s almost always this niggling little voice in the back of my head reminding me, “you might not be here when that happens.”

I’ve tried to document things much more than I might have otherwise. That’s frankly one of the main reasons I did the CafeMom Studios documentary series, “It’s Cancer, Baby.” It’s also part of the reason I blog and write. I want my daughter to know me, even if I’m not around. And I don’t just want her to know about me. I want her to know about her as well, and how she was as a little girl. I love hearing my parents tell stories of how I was as a child. (Don’t we all?) So I decided to start writing periodic letters to my daughter at particular times in her life. Here’s the first one … Read More →

I’ve always been a late bloomer. I sucked my thumb until age five. I played with Barbie dolls until junior high (which, in case you don’t know, is way longer than most girls). I was one of the last of my friends to get her period. In fact, I lied for more than a year about having gotten it, I was so embarrassed. I was out of high school before I got boobs.

I didn’t have a boyfriend until I was a senior, and was pretty sexually inexperienced going into college (I made up for it later). And speaking of college, I left after the first semester of my freshman year because I was homesick. Homesick. I later went back, but opted to go part-time while working and living at home.

I often tell myself stories, and not the good kind. Stories with unhappy endings. Negative fantasies.

Do you do that too?

George Washington said, “Worry is the interest paid by those who borrow trouble.” And I am so often guilty of that, borrowing trouble. I have burned a lot of energy in my lifetime, worrying and losing sleep over things that never came to pass. And I’ve paid a lot of interest as a consequence. Read More →

I recently came to the realization that I may have no choice but to join the ranks of hundreds of thousands of cancer patients on this planet who don’t fully beat cancer but don’t die from it either. The patients who fall into the third option category.

A fellow cancer fighter, the badass Kaylin Andres, wrote recently in the Huffington Post about her ongoing battle with cancer. Her perspective really resonated with me, now more than ever. She said,

“… you start to let go of the prevailing popular opinion that cancer is a battle with only two outcomes — cure or death. There is a third, secret option, relatively unknown to the general healthy public: you learn to live with it.”

Now, if someone had told me when I was first diagnosed with cancer that I’d just “have to learn to live with it”, I would have said fuck that. No way. I want it out and gone. I would have said that anything else is simply unacceptable.

However, the truth is that sometimes we have no choice but to accept the unacceptable. Because sometimes what we once thought of as unacceptable is simply reality.

I recently found out that I have the BRCA1 genetic mutation. And even thoughI’ve recently gone through a hell of a year of intense treatment for widespread gynecologic cancer, I am now facing the fact that I am at very high risk for breast cancer. Like really high risk. I’m told that there is an 87 percent chance that I’ll contract breast cancer in my lifetime. And although at age 45, I’ve already lived through part of my lifetime risk, those odds are still uncomfortably high.

According to the National Cancer Institute, prophylactic mastectomy in high-risk women may reduce the risk of developing breast cancer by 90 percent. As I see it, I didn’t go through 3 surgeries, 24 rounds of aggressive chemotherapy, and a year of fighting my way back to health just to have another form of cancer come in the back door and take me out. Fuck that. This is why, when told that I could voluntarily remove my healthy breasts in order to save my life, I didn’t hesitate to say “I will.”